“’Nother round?” the waitress, wearing an adorable red silk mandarin dress, with a not-so-adorable metal bar through her lower lip, wants to know.
“Four more,” I say, sliding two song slips toward her. “And two songs, please.”
“No more for me,” Shari says. She holds up her mostly full beer bottle. “I’m good.”
The waitress nods and takes my song slips. “Three more, then,” she says, and goes away.
“What did you mean,two songs?” Luke asks me suspiciously. “You didn’t—”
“I want to hear you sing that you’re a cowboy,” I say, my eyes wide with innocence. “And that on a steel horse you ride… ”
Luke’s mouth twists with suppressed mirth.“You—” He lunges at me, but I shrink against Shari, who goes, “Stop it.”
“Save me,” I say to Shari.
“Seriously,” she says. “Cut it out.”
“Oh, come on, Share,” I say, laughing. What’s wrong with her? She used to love goofing around in dive bars. “Sing with me.”
“You’re so annoying,” she says.
“Sing with me,” I beg. “For old times’ sake.”
“Get out,” Shari says, giving me a shove toward the end of the bench we were sitting on. “I have to go pee.”
“I won’t get out,” I say, “unless you sing with me.”
Shari pours her beer over my head.
Later, in the ladies’ room, she apologizes. Abjectly.
“Seriously,” she says, sniffling as she watches me stick my head beneath the hand dryer. “I am so, so sorry. I don’t know what came over me.”
“It’s okay.” I can barely hear her above the roar of the hand dryer—not to mention the keening of the bachelorettes on stage. “Seriously.”
“No,” Shari says. “It’s not okay. I’m a terrible person.”
“You’re not a terrible person,” I say. “I was being a jerk.”
“Well.” Shari is leaning against the radiator. The ladies’ room at Honey’s is not what anyone would call the height of chic decor. There is one sink and one toilet, and the walls have been covered in vomit-beige paint that does little to hide the layers of graffiti beneath it. “You were being a jerk. But not any more than usual. I’m the one who’s turned into such a massive bitch. I seriously don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“Is it your job?” I ask. The hand dryer is solving the problem of my wet hair. But it isn’t doing much for the beery smell coming from my Vicky Vaughn Junior minidress. That’s something I’m going to have to tackle with the Febreze bottle when I get home.
“It’s not my job,” Shari says mournfully. “I love my job.”
“You do?” I can’t hide my surprise. All Shari ever seems to do is complain about her hours and workload.
“I do,” she says. “That’s the problem… I’d rather be there than at home, any day.”
I open my double-flap seventies Meyers handbag (in stunning lime-green vinyl, only thirty-five dollars with my Vintage to Vavoom employee discount) to look for something—anything—that I could spray on myself to get rid of the beery smell. “Is that because you love your job so much?” I ask carefully. “Or because you don’t love Chaz anymore?”
Shari’s face crumples. She puts her hands over it to hide her tears.
“Oh, Share.” My heart twisting, I step away from the hand dryer to put my arms around her. Through the door, I can hear the thump-thump-thump of the bass as the bachelorettes shriek that it’s up to you, New York, New York.
“I don’t know what happened,” Shari sobs. “I just feel like whenever I’m with him, I’m suffocating. And even when he’s not around… it’s like he’s smothering me.”
I am trying to be understanding. Because that’s how best friends are with each other.
But I’ve known Chaz for a long time. And he has so never been the suffocating or smothering type. In fact, it would be hard to find a more happy-go-lucky guy. I mean, except when he’s jabbering on about Kierkegaard.
“What do you mean?” I ask her. “How is he smothering you?”
“Well, like he calls me all the time at work,” Shari says, furiously wiping away her tears. Shari hates it when she cries… and consequently doesn’t do so very often. “Sometimes even twice a day!”
I blink down at her. “Calling someone twice a day at work isn’t all that much,” I say. “I mean, I call you that many times a day. A lot more than that, actually.” I don’t even mention how many times a day I’ve started e- mailing her, now that I spend so many hours at a workstation with an actual computer, on which I’m supposed to record any notes and messages for the lawyers I work for.
“That’s different,” Shari says. “Besides, it’s not just that. I mean, there’s the whole cat thing.” My revealing to Shari that Chaz was thinking about adding a four-legged friend to their domicile had resulted in her being “diagnosed” with a previously unknown dander allergy, and the sad admittance that she would never, alas, be able to live in a house or apartment with anything furry. “There’s also the fact that when I get home from work, he wants to know how my day went! After already having talked about it on the phone.”
I drop my arms from her. “Shari,” I say. “Luke and I talk to each other about a million times a day.” This is a slight exaggeration. But whatever. “And we always ask each other how our day went when we get home.”
“Yeah,” Shari says. “But I bet Luke doesn’t spend the whole day you’re gone lying around the apartment reading Wittgenstein, then going grocery shopping, cleaning the apartment, and making oatmeal cookies.”
My jaw drops. “Chaz goes grocery shopping, cleans, and makes oatmeal cookies while you’re at work?”
“Yes,” Shari says. “And does the laundry. Can you believe that? He does the laundry while I’m at work! And folds everything up into these perfect squares! Even my underwear!”
I am looking at Shari with suspicion now. Something is wrong. Very wrong.
“Share,” I say. “Are you even listening to yourself? You’re mad at your boyfriend because he calls you regularly, cleans your apartment, does the grocery shopping, makes you cookies, and does your laundry. Do you realize that you’ve basically just described the most perfect man in the world?”
Shari scowls at me. “That may sound like the perfect man to some people, but it isn’t to me. You know what would be the perfect man to me? One who was around less. Oh, and get this: he wants sex.Every day . I mean, that was all right back when we were in France. But we were on vacation . Now we’ve got responsibilities—well, some of us do, anyway. Who has time for sex every day? Sometimes he even wants it twice a day, morning and then again at night. I can’t take it, Lizzie. That’s just… that’s just too much. Oh my God… can you believe I just said that?”
I’m glad she asked that, because the answer is no, I can’t. Shari’s always been more sexually aggressive— and adventurous—than me. It looks like the tables have finally turned. I have to keep myself from blurting out that Luke and I often have sex twice a day—and that I quite enjoy it.
“But you and Chaz used to, um, do it that much all the time,” I say. “I mean, when you first started going out. And you liked it then. What’s changed?”
“That’s just it,” Shari says. She looks truly upset. “I don’t know! God, what kind of counselor am I, when I can’t even figure out my own problems? How can I help people with theirs?”
“Well, sometimes it’s easier to help other people with their problems than deal with your own,” I say in what I hope is a soothing voice. “Have you talked about all of this with Chaz? I mean, maybe if you told him what was bothering you—”
“Oh, right,” Shari says sarcastically. “You want me to tell my boyfriend that he’s too perfect?”
“Well,” I say. “You don’t have to put it quite like that. But maybe if you—”
“Lizzie, I am perfectly aware that I sound like a lunatic. There’s something wrong with me. I know it.”
“No,” I cry. “Shari, it’s just… it’s hard. It’s my fault, really. Maybe you guys weren’t ready to move in together. I should never have bailed on you like I did and moved in with Luke. I deserved to have beer poured on me. I deserve to have a lot worse than that done to me—”
“Oh, Lizzie,” Shari says, looking up at me with her dark eyes filled with tears again. “Don’t you get it? It has nothing to do with you. It’s me. There’s something wrong with me . Or at least with the concept of Chaz and me.
